“The anti-corruption leniency agrément and the allocation of recovered resources: a mechanism to repair the rights of those injured by acts of corruption?”
leniency agreement; corruption; allocation of recovered public funds; rights indemnification.
The anticorruption leniency agreement is a relatively new institute in the Brazilian legal system and still lacks concrete guidelines for its practical application, both due to the difficulty generated by specific casuistic elements and the complexity of the offenses involved, which span different spheres of accountability, thus hindering legal certainty. Based on the hypothesis that the allocation of recovered public resources does not always effectively repair the harmed legal assets resulting from acts of corruption, especially social rights such as public health, education, and state infrastructure, as they are integrated into the General Budget of the Union without any specific binding, the purpose of this study is to identify gaps, both in theory and in practice, through the analysis of three variables provided in the agreements: the categories of accountability, the identification of harmed entities for correct allocation, and the method of payment or disbursement of monetary funds. To accomplish this, leniency agreements entered into the Federal Public Prosecutor’s Office and the Comptroller General’s Office, in cooperation with the X 2 Attorney General, competent lenient authorities, were analyzed during the period of 2014 to 2023. Thus, it is worth noting that the analysis was limited to agreements that are no longer confidential and are publicly available.